. I'm not sure I agree with MW's idea of announcing to the dems that they have 2 weeks or else a national emergency will be declared -
No, I said
give them two weeks to come to the table. I did not mean he should publicly
announce that he's setting a two week deadline. Sorry if I wasn't clear.
You're absolutely right; he shouldn't reveal his hand.
I'm curious how you deal with someone who enters negotiations as an unreliable party? Do you employ additional safeguards in the settlement to insure the terms are met? Start unrealistically high and work down to conditions you know the other party can demonstratively achieve?
Depends on the circumstances. Different circumstances mean different possible outcomes based on the strategy selected.
Obviously, we don't like to remain in a lending arrangement with a dishonest and defaulting borrower if there is any opportunity to exit. If there is an ability for them to refinance, we'd generally ask them to do that first. Option #2 is generally to ask them to sell their business (and giving them a fractional slice of the proceeds for being cooperative, even if prospective proceeds are highly unlikely to make us whole). Option #3 - when all else fails - is to foreclose on assets and run a forced liquidation.
If we cannot trust management and/or ownership, then usually #1 or #2 would come with the added condition of a Chief Restructuring Officer being appointed to oversee things.
When you threaten a borrower with legal action or foreclosure of assets, they often sit up straight and start acting reasonably. On business loan transactions where personal guaranties exist, the range of options is a bit broader than what I describe above. The transactions I manage almost never have personal guaranties in place, though, since ownership of my borrowers usually consists of hedge funds, private investors, etc.
If a debtor in default or legal counsel representing a debtor in default asked us dismiss all pending legal action as an upfront condition of entering negotiations for a possible settlement, we'd tell them to pound sand (in a professional way). We'd consider such a request to be absurd. Yet, that's analogous to what Pelosi is asking Trump to do!
In any adversarial situation, from a negotiating standpoint, we generally include things in any initial proposal that we view as "gravy" or nice-to-have (but not "must have") that we can toss out if that's what's required to get a debtor to come to a mutually acceptable agreement with us.
Morgan Wallen is a piece of garbage.